Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Game On

A black and white photograph of a smiling woman in a room filled with camera equipment and a bookshelf.Rauner Library wants you for the "Five Ws" - who, what, where, when, and potentially why. We've collaborated with Digital Humanities Professor Mary Flanagan and Tiltfactor.org to create a series of games based on our large collection of Dartmouth related images. The first one is live now at Alum Tag. (Note that the game site is no longer  available.)

A black and white photograph of three men crowded around a table and examining a book of photographs.
For many of our archival images we have little or no descriptive information other than a very broad topic such as "Winter Carnival" or "Dartmouth Hall." A lot of the key elements are missing - like "Who is that standing to the left of the signpost?" or "What year is this really?" For the image to the right, we only know that is has something to do with the Aegis, Dartmouth's yearbook.

How does it work? The game asks the user to describe the image in as much detail as they can and weighs the data supplied based on frequency and other measures to determine the validity of the users' descriptions. We eventually hope to use this crowd-sourced metadata to enhance our online image collection of Dartmouth College Photographs to make the collection more accessible to users.

Go Play!

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